E-commerce merchants have a wide range of product offerings across a diverse set of customer genres. When users enter an e-commerce website experience, there is a limited opportunity to select among these offerings or advertisements to present relevant content that will ultimately lead to a product purchase. Typically, there is a very limited amount of information that is available to the site customization process regarding the interests and actions that have led the user to enter the particular e-commerce website. Behavioral targeting seeks to understand the user in order to provide the most relevant offering with the goal of gaining and retaining customers.
Behavioral targeting generally involves the collection of information about a web user or consumer's online activities in order to deliver advertising targeted to potential purchases. By observing the web activities of millions of consumers, advertising networks may closely match the consumer with relevant advertising. This observation generally involves the collection and analysis of click stream and other online user behavior to create a score or profile that, as accurately as possible, identifies the consumer as a person who may be interested in certain products or content. Collection of data typically involves the tagging of web sites in order to track and capture click stream data as the consumer browses a web site. Data may be collected and stored in a database or data warehouse and is subjected to data mining algorithms to uncover patterns in browser behavior. The results of the data mining procedure is used to create the behavioral profile or score which may then be used to serve targeted ads matched to the user's profile.
While this process works well for creating advertising, such as banner ads, on third party sites, advertising drives a only a small percentage of revenue. A system and method is needed that will increase the likelihood of actually making a purchase when the customer or shopper is on a store web site. The present invention provides such a system and offers other advantages over the prior art.